WASHINGTON: Double blows from forest destruction and climate change have caused temperatures to soar in many tropical locations, making outdoor work not safe for millions of workers, according to a study published Friday.
Between 2003-2018, this study was found, around 4.9 million people lost at least half an hour per day working conditions at recognized temperatures as safe.
“The tropical location is already at the end of too hot and moist to work safely because of climate change,” said Lukas Parsons, the main author on paper published in the journal One Earth.
“Deforestation can encourage these places on the edge to the work environment that is not even safe.” Parsons research further found that 91,000 people lost more than two hours of safe working temperatures per day – a great majority in Asia.
Deforestation is known to increase local temperatures, because the trees block solar radiation, giving shade, and cooling air through evapotranspiration – transporting water from the ground and evaporating it from the surface of their leaves.
But when Parsons explained in an email to AFP, “So far, many arguments to preserve tropical forests have been based on biodiversity or global climate mitigation.” “We hope this research provides additional information about the relationship between local forest health and human health which will be considered a cost and benefits of deforestation than,” he said.
During the study period, researchers found that the increase in temperature associated with deforestation was far greater than it was from climate change recently.
To achieve their conclusions, they check the combination of temperature reading, population estimates, and satellite imagery of global deforestation between 2003 and 2018.
And they focus on case studies: Brazilian countries Mato Grosso and the Amazon rainforest forest and have seen scale deforestation Great for the past two decades.
In almost 60 percent of the deforested regions, temperatures increased by more than 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
In areas that are not cleaned from their forest cover, the figure is less than eight percent.
Similarly, 47 percent of the deforested area losses more than half an hour per day safe working temperature, compared with only four percent of the forest area.
The Parsons team calculates that 1.22 million square kilometers (301 million hectares) tropical forests are destroyed or degraded during the study period.
“If a local community can prevent some tropical deforestation, there may be real benefits for people living in areas with tropical forests,” he said.